Chapter 11
Chapter Eleven
Chandler
“What are you doing here?”
Here, in the privacy of her workshop, I let my eyes roam the way they’d wanted to out there in front of her family. In front of everyone. She had on bright red pants with flowers stitched all over them and a white tee, over top of which she was wearing a smock that was dotted with wax like a melting Jackson Pollock.
“I told you. I want more of the candles I bought the other day. The beach…”
“Beach Bum.”
“Yeah.” I folded my arms.
“How many?”
“Whatever you have left.”
Her eyes turned into slits. “Why?”
“Do you interrogate all your customers?” I chuckled.
“Only the ones who lie to me from the start,” she quipped and strode to the back of the room, returning after a few seconds of shuffling and grumbling with a box of candles that she set on the counter next to me. “This is all I have.”
“And I’ll take this one.” I set the cinnamon candle on top. At least the reminder of her would be invisible to everyone but me.
“If you think buying up a bunch of my candles is going to soften me up so I back down from our arrangement, you’re?—”
“Not trying to soften you up.” Though the words conjured up a whole damn different image in my head. A soft Frankie. Soft and naked and mine?—
“What then? Bribe me?” She shook her head. “I don’t want your money or your support, Mr. Collins.”
My jaw pulsed, and without thinking better of it, I ventured into the shallow end of the truth. “My mom likes this candle,” I said, and she stopped and turned. “Your…Gigi said that you hand make all the candles, so I wanted to make sure I got whatever was left of this batch.”
“Oh.”Pink obscured the freckles on her cheeks again. “Your mom liked it?”
I shouldn’t have said anything.
“She loves the beach.”I still shouldn’t be saying anything. And so, I did what I always do, I made it about business. “What do I owe you?”
Frankie stiffened and quipped, “An inn.”
“Cute.”
Our eyes collided at the word, sparks threatening to melt every bit of wax she had stored in here.
“Just take them. They were leftover anyway,” she murmured and returned to a line of beakers on the counter, flanked by vials with droppers in them.
“Is this how you make your scents?” I wondered…and wandered closer.
“Yes, and it’s all proprietary, so you can go now. ”
I fought a smile. “I have no intention nor desire to steal your recipes and make candles.”
“No?” She tipped her head over her shoulder, her eyes piercing mine. “I thought you liked stealing other people’s dreams right out from under them.”
Touché.
“I’m not stealing anything from your sister, Frankie. That’s just business.” I stood beside her, my voice lower.
“And so is this, so if you don’t mind…” Her focus returned to her work—or at least that was what she wanted me to believe.
“I’m not leaving.”
“Why not? Don’t you have business? ”
I rested my hip on the counter, watching her eyes lower for a second down to my waist, and goddamn if it didn’t feel like the hard hold of her stare had wrapped tight around my cock. Jesus.
“I do. And it’s right here.”
Her full lips parted and then tightened into a line. “What are you talking about? I’m not your business.”
“You are when you’re the one blocking my deal with your whole haunted inn fable.”
“Not a fable, just fact.”
“Then it shouldn’t be a problem for me to hang out here and make sure you don’t do anything extreme.”
“Like suggesting we sleep in an abandoned inn to prove it’s not haunted?”
God, that mouth of hers. Fire oozed under my skin. The things I wanted to do to her smart mouth… the things I wanted to let her smart mouth do to me. Not smart. Not smart at all.
“Like setting up and faking ghost activity to ensure you win the deal. ”
The dropper in her fingers tumbled onto the counter, splattering several drops of scented oil on top.
“Really? Is that what you think?” she said flatly, but I swore the color in her cheeks deepened.
“You set up a sidewalk séance.”
“That was different.” She wiped the drops of oil so vigorously, she looked about to rub a hole in the counter. “You’re the one who suggested we sleep there. Not me.”
“True, but…”
“But what?” Now, she faced me, hips cocked on one side and arms folded.
“You’re not one to back down from an opportunity when it presents itself,” I said and stepped closer, watching the hitch of her breath.
“Who would?” She notched her chin higher; it was meant in defiance, but all it did was put her mouth—her fucking delicious, damaging mouth—in line with mine.
“Someone who recognizes when they’re playing with fire.”
Her eyes lowered to my mouth, the color in them shifting from bronze to molten amber. The kind that fossilized every fleck of desire in them. “Lucky for me, that’s all I do.”
I should look away—step away. I was way beyond all the lines I should’ve stayed behind—way beyond any semblance of business being here.
My gaze left the depths of hers to roam her face. Freckles dusted her nose and cheeks, hidden by the pink of her blush—a shade of rose that was darkened and then echoed in the full swells of her lips. Fierce and so fucking kissable.
My head lowered, drawn to her—to the scent of her. Cinnamon. Sweet but subtly sharp, luring you in with honeyed warmth, and only when you went to move away did you realize the hooks left in you made it impossible to smell anything without a hint of it. Impossible to do anything without thinking of her.
And that was a problem.
“So, you’re going to booby trap the inn?” I asked and took a step back,the distance like a hit to my gut as it stole all the oxygen from my lungs.
“And how would I do that?” She scoffed and spun back to her mixing station on the counter.
My eyes locked on the open bottle of scented oil, and I reached for it without thinking, needing something to chase the scent of her away.
“What—”
“Is that…cherry?”
I caught the slight widening of her eyes, a burst of admiration warming her expression for a split second before she shielded it. This woman…she didn’t admire my billions or my business or my looks, she admired that I could identify a damn scent.
“Black cherry.”
“Right,” I murmured, taking one more breath before she plucked it from my fingers.
“Look, I have work to do, but if you insist on staying?—”
“I do.”
“Then you’re going to work, too,” she said, flashing me a breezy smile before pulling out a box from underneath the counter and shoving it against my chest. “Follow me.”
I got lost in the sway of her hips, unable to focus on what I was carrying or where, until she spun and my eyes snapped back to hers.
“That”—she nodded to the box—“goes in here.” She lifted the lid off a giant silver container on the counter. It had a spout almost likeadrink dispenser and was plugged into the wall .
“All right.” I set the box down and opened the top; it was filled to the brim with thin white flakes.
“Four-six-four soy wax.” She reached in and let a handful of flakes flutter from her fingertips before dumping them into the metal container. “This is what melts it together, and then”—she reached across the counter for a thermometer—“we’ll pour it out when it’s about one-eight-five.”
“So, my job is to dump wax into a pot?”
“And monitor the temperature.” Her smile was too close to a smirk for my liking. “I don’t want to give you anything too strenuous or dangerous.”
“Dangerous?”
“You could burn yourself.”
“Maybe I like wax play.”
She choked on whatever flippant remark she was going to say next, and it was worth whatever line I’d crossed with the comment—to see her lose her cool for a second. To see behind the bravado.
The thermometer clattered from her fingers, which she quickly slapped into silence with her palm.
“Well.” She cleared her throat. “I don’t have another apron, so the only thing you’re playing with is your very nice, very expensive clothes,” she warned as though it would make me change my mind.
My smile widened. “Good thing I can afford to buy new ones.” I set the box on the counter, enjoying her soft mutter of frustration as she went back to her scent-making.
“So. Sixteen years old?” I picked the scooper out of the box and took one filled scoop over to the giant melter.
“I see Gigi was quite chatty this morning.”
“I can’t imagine her not being chatty,” I admitted, carefully adding another dose of wax to the melter, watching the flakes start to disappear into one another .
“She’s a force to be reckoned with.”
“She says the same about you.”The wax landed with a flurry in the pot. “So why candles?”
“Do you have something against candles? Or just historic and community preservation?”
I laughed. I couldn’t fucking help it and couldn’t fucking explain it. If I were back in Boston, in my office, and someone said that to me, I’d be that much more determined to do whatever the hell I wanted to do, consequences be damned.I wouldn’t laugh.I wouldn’t enjoy being criticized. But for some reason, even her critiques were like cinnamon. Barbed but sweet.
“I have nothing against either.” I stirred the thick wax, adding another scoop of flakes just as the last had almost finished melting.
“It’s because he sold it to us, isn’t it?” she asked quietly and straightened.
I felt her eyes on me, but I didn’t turn—didn’t move.
“It’s because I have a better offer. That’s all.” And it had nothing to do with the fact that the Kinkades were who my half-brother had chosen to sell to when he thought the inn was willed to him. Nothing to do with the fact that I wanted to distance myself from everything involving Geoff Collins, his children, and their decisions.
“Excuse me.”
I tensed, realizing she was right beside me, but instead of moving away from the counter, I only turned, thinking she just wanted to check the temperature for the wax. She did, but that wasn’t all she came over for.
Her shoulder brushed my chest when she dipped the thermometer in the wax and swirled it for a second before taking a reading.
“If it’s too hot, when I add the fragrance oil, some of it will evaporate, but if it’s too cold, it won’t bind well,” she explained softly. “You can keep adding.” She wiped the thermometer tip and moved in front of me again.
It wasn’t the process that was fascinating—I mean, it was. But what had ahold on my attention was her. The way she moved, both with precision and without thought. I watched, mesmerized, as she slid a digital scale from where it was propped against the wall, pressing some of the buttons before she placed a small beaker on top and began to measure out some of the scented oil she’d been mixing.
“How do you know how much to use?”
“The rule of thumb is six to ten percent of the volume of wax you’reusing is how much fragrance to add.” She plucked the beaker off the scale, now filled with the murky red liquid.
Again, her shoulder brushed against my chest because I didn’t move out of her determined path fast enough. Maybe I didn’t want to.
“Gigi was the one who bought me a candle-making kit for my thirteenth birthday. It was just something fun at first. Something I’d do here and there with Lou. With my friends.” She tipped her head, assessing the level of the wax and then dunking the thermometer once more before murmuring, “Perfect.”
She moved likeacandle nymph. Flitting around me as trays of empty glass jars appeared and then three metal pitchers, one larger than the other two. The entire time, it was arms to shoulders. Chest to arms. I brushed against her so many times, it was a damn miracle the wax hadn’t evaporated from the heat.
“I need you to wipe out all the jars for me. Sometimes there are smudges on the inside.” She handed me a towel, and one of my eyebrows lifted. “Please.”
I palmed the base of one jar, wiped the inside, and replaced it on the tray. The task was mindless, which let my mind wander right back to where it wanted to be. Her.
“What happened at sixteen?” I asked again as she held the larger metal container under the spigot of the wax melter and opened the valve and let a rush of burning wax fill the container.
“The way Gigi tells it, or the truth?”
My heart thudded. What I wouldn’t do for even a sliver of the truth from her…
“Both.”
“When I was sixteen, I wanted to make some extra money, so I started playing around with blueberry scented candles, knowing I could sell them at my mom’s store along with her jam. I wanted to be a part of the business, but I wanted to do it my own way.”
No surprise there, I thought. “That’s Gigi’s version.”
She hesitated. “Yeah.”
I stilled. “And the truth?”
She stopped the wax from pouring out and brought the metal container over to the scale. I stood silently—impatiently—as she set an empty pitcher on the scale and began to measure out wax from the container she’d just filled into it. Her concentration on the task was disproportionate to its simplicity. She wasn’t weighing the wax as much as she weighed the decision to tell me the real story or not.
“When I was sixteen, my brother Kit came home from the hospital for the second time,” she began slowly, and with just one sentence, the story veered from anything I’d been thinking. “The first time was what brought him home from the war. The second time was after the marathon bombing.”
Damn. I forced the air through my lips, the weight of her story pressurizing my chest. I couldn’t imagine what that was like—I didn’t even feel like I had the right to. But I couldn’t stop myself from imagining her. Sixteen. Both of her older brothers clearly had filled the void that her deadbeat father had left. And then to almost lose one of them. Twice.
“I’m sorry,” I said, wishing there was some sum of money I could pay to make those words feel like they actually did something.
“It was hard for him—hard for all of us.” She moved the pitcher off the scale once it weighed the correct amount, and then did the same with the second pitcher. “Gigi started dying her hair. My cousins and I started pulling silly pranks on each other—anything to try and lighten the mood. And Kit…he pretended well enough during the day, but at night…”
I finished wiping all the jars clean when Frankie grabbed the thermometer again and checked the temperature of each pitcher. The whole time, I didn’t say anything—I didn’t want to say anything because I wanted her to finish, and the silence felt like one more challenge between us. To sense who would be the first to break it.
“Perfect,” she murmured, and then grabbed the smaller beaker of her fragrance. “I like to add it when it’sjust under one-eighty-five.”
She poured the fragrance into the hot wax, tipping forward and taking a deep breath.She wrinkled her nose, and you would’ve thought the way my dick hardened she’d decided to strip right in front of me, but no, I was turned on—aching—from a damn nose twitch.
Her eyes fluttered open, staring at the wax, but I could tell she wasn’t seeing it. She wasn’t seeing anything except the continuation of her story.
“The nightmares got so bad, he stopped sleeping in his room because he knew he kept waking us. So, Kit moved to the couch. It helped us sleep better, but not him.” She robotically repeated the process with the second pitcher, using a container of fragrance that was already mixed.“One day, I decided to make candles—blueberry candles to mimic the scent of Mom’s jam to sell in her store. Anyway, I lit the candle, forgot I lit the candle until around midnight, and I ran downstairs to douse it, and that was when I saw him;Kit was asleep on the couch. He was sleeping soundly.”
Damn. Before I could say anything, she plucked something from the shelf below, and when she handed it to me with the instructions, she said, “Now, we stir.”
“Chopsticks?” I took a pair and followed her lead, dunking them into the second pitcher and stirring while she did the other.
“I order a lot of takeout while I’m working, so I have a lot of extra sticks,” she explained, pausing for a few long seconds before she finished her story.“Of course, I thought that night was a fluke…that it was just a random, peaceful night of sleep. So, I tested it out every night for the next two weeks, and every night I lit that candle, Kit slept…soundly.”
“Wow,” I rumbled, not knowing what else to say. What the hell else did you say? At sixteen, I’d been preoccupied with two things: girls and how I was going to make so much money so that Mom never had to worry again—so much money that my father would know my name and regret walking away from someone who’d achieved so much.
At sixteen, she’d started a business to save her brother’s life.Not literally, but damn if it wasn’t fucking close. And this whole time, I’d looked at her candles—her store—as some quaint little hobby that only a tiny town with a huge tourist population could turn into a business.
“At first, I wanted to understand it—how it helped him. So, I looked online and read all these articles and papers on the psychology of smell.” She took another sample of the scented wax. “Compared to our other senses, smell can trigger an immediate emotional response, along with a memory.”
I stilled, Mom’s face flashing in my mind the instant she breathed that beach candle—the instant she came back to me. It was the whole reason I was here—to make that last.
“Scents that evoke a personal memory can trigger slower, deeper breathing. A reduction in stress.”
I cleared my throat and willed my focus to stay on her and her story. “So, the blueberries brought him back…”
“We’d all grown up making that blueberry jam together with Mom and Gigi. Mom joked that she made so much jam while she was pregnant with us that there might be blueberries rather than blood running through our veins.” Frankie sighed. “Kit moved out not long after that, but when he left, he asked me to keep making him candles.”
My jaw pulsed as I watched her tongue swipe over her lips and her lashes flutter against her cheeks. She didn’t have to be staring straight at me for me to see the way her eyes glistened.
“And that’s when you started your business.”
Her head bobbed. “Everyone always thinks the candle’s light is the only way out of the darkness, but it’s not. You don’t always need a light to be able to find peace.” A shadow of a smile teased her lips, and holy hell, I was never going to look at a candle the same way.
My jaw pulsed, and I managed only an “I see,” my mind consumed with thoughts of Mom—of telling Frankie what that damn beach candle had done for her.
“I can prove it,” she declared softly, taking my silence as doubt when it was nothing short of pure, humbling admiration.
Frankie lifted her chopsticks from the pitcher and stuck them right under my nose, leaving me no choice but to breathe in the final result. I’d expected the black cherry and had a good guess at the other scents she’d incorporated. I hadn’t expected the memory—the scene. The restaurant.
“The steakhouse.”
Her wide smile made my chest pound. “Black cherry. Rosemary. Peppercorn. Cedarwood.”
I inhaled again, but it was more than the memory of the restaurant that assaulted me this time. It was those seconds that seared into my mind of that kiss, and when my eyes opened and met hers, I knew she was thinking the same.
The wine. The ambiance. The attraction. The lies. That night, we’d been people who didn’t have to be enemies.
“Frankie…” My voice was hoarse.
Her hand wavered, and I grabbed her wrist. The scent didn’t matter anymore, but I didn’t want her to pull away. She shivered, goose bumps rising to the call of heat on her skin.
This woman was fire. Bold. Bright. Burning with life and determination. And all I wanted was to make her melt for me.
I left my chopsticks sitting in the wax and reached for her neck. Just the catch of her breath made my dick even harder in my pants. Maybe it was the scent of her—maybe later I’d blame the damn cinnamon for making me think…making me want something I’d never otherwise consider. What fucking asshole would do this? What asshole would kiss the woman whose sister was trying to do business with him? It blurred so many goddamn lines—opened up so many avenues for legal and ethical impropriety…but for the first time, I just couldn’t fucking care.
Not when her lashes fluttered shut, dusting her cheeks with a deeper shade of pink. Not when her lips parted—lips that had both criticized and cursed me all within the last hour. She was fire, and I was Icarus, who flew too close to her flame.
I growled and brushed my mouth to hers, softly at first like I was diffusing a bomb; one wrong move and this whole place would go up in smoke. But soft—slow—wasn’t in Frankie’s wheelhouse. Not when it came to what she wanted. Not according to her grandmother.
Once Frankie knows what she wants, she’ll do anything to have it.
And she wanted this kiss.
Her mouth surged up to mine, her small frame tipping into me when she went up on her tiptoes and demanded something deeper.
This time, the sound I made was feral as I hauled her to me. I wasn’t mixing business with pleasure, I was fucking obliterating it for one more taste of her. My arm locked around her back, holding her almost aggressively to my front, where there was no mistaking the way she affected me. We could banter and bicker—hell, she could legitimately hate me, but that wouldn’t change this.
The wick might hate the flame, but that wouldn’t alter how it would burn.
My thumb pistoned underneath her chin, tilting her head back, but it was her tongue that searched out the seam of my lips first. Fearless. Fierce. I gave her what she wanted—at this point, I was sure I’d give her anything as long as she kept moaning the way she was.
I tangled my tongue with her silky one, the sweet bite of cinnamon setting off a chain reaction in me I was powerless to stop. It made me weak. Ravenous. Desperate for more. My hand slid to her ass, and that was when she started to move—gently rocking against the ridge of my cock. Stars erupted in my brain.
“ Fuck,” I hissed into the warmth of her mouth and spun her against the counter. Too forcefully because the whole thing jostled and rattled, something tipped over with a crash, and instantly, Frankie pulled back.
Panting, our eyes locked. Her fists curled into my shirt. My hand bracketed around her neck. Our hips wedged together like the heat between us could evaporate our clothes. This was wrong. All wrong. But neither of us wanted to move—to burst the bubble where it felt so right.
“The wax.” Her voice was firm but fragile like an eggshell as she slid out of my hold,leaving my hands gripping the edge of the counter for support.
Her attention returned to the long-forgotten pitchers on the counter, meanwhile, my concern was solely focused on whether or not I was going to be able to walk— move— with how fucking hard I was.
Taking deep, painful breaths, I looked at her as she checked the temperatures in the pitchers. Her shoulders slumped with relief at the reading, so everything must still be okay. As long as she didn’t check my temperature, it would be. My blood felt like it was fucking boiling.
“We have to pour the wax before it cools,” she instructed, her tone brittle with false bravado as she tried to conceal the effects of our kiss. “There’s a bag of wicks under the counter. I need you to stick one to the inside of each jar, and then I’ll pour the wax in.”
My jaw locked. She wasn’t asking me to leave. After what just happened, she had every right to. Hell, after what just happened, I should want to—I should be desperate for a second to cool down and become rational again. Logical. Emotionless.
But I didn’t want that. I didn’t want distance or relief. I wanted the torture of remaining in her presence for a little longer. So, I did exactly what I was told and wondered how the hell I was going to spend another night alone with the woman who set my body on fire, let alone another five more after it.